Pity the poor men and women who bring your Canada Post mail every weekday. Not only do they have to perform their appointed rounds through rain, snow, sleet and hail. They also have to endure the stigma of a labour union that acts as a mouthpiece for every imaginable radical left-wing cause — including the demonization of Israel.

In 2008, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) passed a resolution “support[ing] the international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions” against the Jewish state — a step that led some Canadians to wonder whether the union would command its workers to stop delivering mail to the Israeli embassy. Earlier this year, CUPW announced its support for Canadian activists seeking to bring supplies to Hamas-run Gaza. And this week, we learned that CUPW is co-sponsor of an upcoming anti-Israel conference in Montreal originally scheduled to feature Bongani Masuku, an anti-Semitic South African labour leader who threatened “the Jews in South Africa” with harm if they expressed support for Zionism. (As of noon Tuesday, Mr. Masuku was featured on the conference web site under the heading of “keynote speakers” — along with CUPW President Denis Lemelin. By early afternoon, after Mr. Masuku’s participation has been highlighted on the blog Eye on a Crazy Planet, his name had been scrubbed in favour of other officials from his organization, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, known as COSATU.)

But the CUPW’s obsessive hostility toward Israel isn’t an isolated phenomenon. As the union’s International Solidarity committee proudly boasts in its literature, CUPW opposes the global war on terror everywhere. This includes the war in Afghanistan, which seems an awkward fit given postal workers’ key role in delivering mail between our soldiers overseas and their families back home. In some cases, the International Solidarity committee’s positions completely contradict the union’s mandate to protect labour rights: CUPW regularly releases propaganda statements supporting communist Cuba, the only nation in the Western hemisphere where independent CUPW-style labour unions are illegal.

Unlike Cuba, Canada is a free country. And activists are perfectly free to embrace whatever political positions they want. But CUPW is a labour union whose activities are funded by its members’ compulsory dues. Which raises the question: How do rank-and-file postal workers feel about CUPW’s leaders traipsing to sunspots around the world to express their “solidarity” with radical left-wing causes?

Last year, for instance, CUPW sent a delegation of four activists to the World Social Forum in Brazil. There, they learned about “the need for an alternative system to capitalism driven by a feminist analysis.” A CUPW report on the event also proudly indicates that union Vice-President Donald Lafleur gave a presentation in Brazil about the CUPW’s campaign to boycott Israel.

And that’s just a drop in the bucket. On the CUPW’s web site is a long list containing dozens of similar recent events. In 2008 and again in 2009, three CUPW reps went to Geneva for two separate meetings related to the discredited Durban anti-racism agenda. (The inaugural Durban meeting in 2001, readers will recall, was a festival of anti-Semitism and Israel-bashing.) In May, 2009, nine CUPW members attended May Day activities in Havana, where they “learned about the ongoing need to work in solidarity with Cuba.” A few weeks later, the CUPW’s National Director for the Quebec Region went on an “alternative fact-finding mission to Israel and Palestine.” Then, a few months later, another CUPW official went on his own, separate “investigation of [the] human-rights situation in Palestine and opportunities for solidarity.” A month later, it was off to the “march on Gaza” in Cairo to “support the struggle of Palestinian people.”

In 2010, CUPW officials attended a variety of climate-change conferences (presumably to learn how higher temperatures might impact the need for more lightweight postal-worker uniforms). They also returned to Cuba for another May Day celebration — this time bringing no fewer than 10 delegates. Among the dozens of other junkets was a trip to South Africa, where Mr. Lemelin hob-knobbed with officials from COSATU, whose international secretary, Bongani Masuku, is the anti-Semite referenced above.

The vast majority of ordinary Canadian postal workers presumably have little knowledge of or interest in the obscure left-wing activism conducted by their union’s brain trust. And that’s understandable: They’re too busy delivering the actual mail to keep track of who’s jet-setting off to Ramallah and Havana on the CUPW dime. But maybe they should start paying attention, especially when union elections come around: The CUPW’s activities are not only a waste of workers’ dues, they’re also a disgrace to the postal industry more broadly. Ordinary letter carriers and sorters aren’t bigots or radicals. Perhaps they should elect a union leadership that answers to the same description.

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